Modern vehicles (e.g., airplanes, boats, trains, cars, trucks, etc.) can include a vehicle event recorder in order to better understand the timeline of an anomalous event (e.g., an accident). A vehicle event recorder typically includes a set of sensors, e.g., video recorders, audio recorders, accelerometers, gyroscopes, vehicle state sensors, GPS (global positioning system), etc., that report data, which is used to determine the occurrence of an anomalous event. If an anomalous event is detected, then sensor data related to the event is stored for later review. In some systems, sensor data is then transmitted to an external reviewing system. When it is impractical to transmit all sensor data to the external reviewing system (e.g., due to a high cost of data transmission or large data files), a subset of the data must be selected for transmission.